From Bedrooms to Billions – UK Gaming: The Movie

The British video games industry is finally getting the recognition it deserves, as two filmmakers take to Kickstarter to fund the ultimate documentary.

From Bedrooms to Billions – the rise and fall of UK gaming

For Anthony and Nicola Caulfield the attempt to chart the history of the UK video games industry is a labour of love that started 15 years ago. But despite over a decade of being told no by TV channels and commissioners all it took was five days on Kickstarter to make their dream a reality.

From Bedrooms to Billions: A Scientific Curiosity that Sparked a Revolution is a two-hour documentary that charts the rise and fall of the UK games industry, from its humble beginnings in hobbyists’ bedrooms to a social phenomenon that, almost, conquered the world.

The two filmmakers needed only £18,000 to complete their work on the documentary, and at the time of writing they’re already at £24,293 with still 50 days to go. That leaves an awful lot of room for stretch goals, and hopefully an even bigger budget to work with.

The story begins in 1979 and follows the UK industry from its early triumphs to its lowest ebb and its potential revival in the era of indie and smartphone gaming. With over 50 interviews already completed – with everyone from Manic Miner’s Matthew Smith to Elite creator David Braben – we certainly can’t wait to see the finished film ourselves.

But in lieu of that we spoke to co-creator Anthony Caulfield about why he’s been so passionate about the project and why he thinks the story of UK gaming is one that needs to be told. There’s additional information at the From Bedrooms to Billions website, but the all-important Kickstarter page, where you can make your own donation to the project, is right here.

GC: So how did all this come together? It’s very rare for the history of British gaming to be talked about in any forum, let alone a two-hour documentary.

AC: Absolutely correct. Nicola and I are documentary makers by trade and we’ve made numerous documentaries over the years, generally for the BBC or Channel 4. And one of our original brief documents, where we came up with all our ideas back in 1998 when we both decided we wanted to make docs, we wrote – literally third on the list – the story of the UK video games industry. Simply because we felt that as we both grew up in the 1980s it affected you on a cultural level, as well as creating jobs and industry and invention and all sorts of amazing things that came from it.

It was very much part of that late ‘70s and ‘80s culture, and into the ‘90s too with the next generation kicking on through. But what happened in ’98 is that we were thinking, ‘Whatever happened to all those UK companies and developers?’ Because in the early to mid ‘80s they were being treated, these individuals as they were at that time, they were being treated like rock stars.

You went to the big trade fares in the 1980s, which by the mid ‘80s were held in Olympia and Earls Court, and you would see lines and lines of kids cueing up to get autographs from these programmers that suddenly were thrust into the limelight. And it was also the journalism that came out, where suddenly we were seeing games magazines everywhere and this amazing artwork. And suddenly this whole industry seemed to come from nowhere.

And when we started to research it in the late ‘90s, and we found that actually the UK story is very unique when you consider the other countries around the world that have also had video game industries. So what we were interested in was how it got started, where it came from, and what happened – where did it go? Because by the late ‘90s we had I think one major publisher left, whereas in the mid ‘80s at one point – it’s arguable this, hence the documentary – but for about six months we were actually leading the world. There was a period where our games were flooding America and… not so much Japan but certainly all the way across Europe.

Our developers were being looked upon as the guvnors and then effectively within six years that was gone. And so we wanted to understand what happened, how could you lose that many companies, how could you suffer that many buyouts, and see such an exodus of UK talent going abroad.

GC: Well that’s the way it’s always been explained to me, that there was a massive brain drain to America and Canada. And that all of our publishers, and many of the developers, were bought out by foreign companies. And once the brain drain took place the home computer market had shifted solely to the more expensive PC, and so the developers were never replaced with more bedroom programmer types.

AC: That’s another thing when you’re making a documentary: you set a series of questions at the top of your sheet with what you hope to answer by the time you get to the end of filming all these interviews. You try to at least create a balance. For example, if a lot of developers say, ‘Oh, the publishers ripped me off’ you then ask the publishers straight questions and try to get a balanced view back. Like any journalist you try to get to the root of something, but you also try to understand that actually the publishers had a pretty difficult time as well, when they were dealing with the hardware manufacturers and other things.

But with all that being said, the story itself we thought of it as a rise and fall story. But in 1998 it was purely the fall, because it was all pretty much gone. Apart from Tomb Raider and GoldenEye, which were massive, massive British games that did actually dominate the world for a short time. But we weren’t seeing much else.

To roll forward, when we were going into the BBC or Channel 4 we were regularly, and when I say regularly I mean once a year at least, re-pitching what we sketched out as a three-part television documentary series on the history of the UK video games industry. But we could never get any interest, we would always get this phrase of ‘video games are too niche’. ‘Niche’ would always be the word, Channel 4 would say it too.

GC: Funnily enough I was interviewing Jonathon Ross just yesterday and he was saying something very similar. He said it was a naturally more difficult subject to present on television, but that the TV companies just weren’t interested. Charlie Brooker had a similar problem I believe, his Gameswipe one-off was more successful than any of his others up until that point but the BBC still said no to a full series.

AC: That’s really interesting, because we would regularly go in every year or so because that was the hand that feeds. So you can’t sort of go, ‘This is outrageous!’ and storm out or something. So we would get something commissioned, we did a lot of music docs and a lot of comedy docs. We did a documentary on The Young Ones and the alternative comedy scene – you can see all those on our website.

So that was great, and that was sort of the stuff we really wanted to do, but we’d always return to this gaming doc as well. And I remember by the mid-2000s we’d get, ‘Oh, not that gaming thing again’. And you would actually get things like, ‘Ah, it’s just Pac-Man and other things’ and you’d think, ‘OK, Pac-Man is not actually a British game and it’s a million miles away from the type of story we’re looking to tell’.

So you then realise that there’s a disconnect between the media powers, as it were, and their understanding of the industry. And also in taking it seriously with the way the industry actually is. And then when you start interviewing all these heads of businesses that ran video games companies – some of them are millionaires and some of them are broke – but they would all say the same thing. That in this country, whether it be the broadcast media or certainly the financial sector, the banks, they don’t regard video games as a serious business.

Whereas in Japan and the U.S. it’s very much a serious business, it makes a lot of money. Fergus McGovern, for example, the gentleman that sold Probe Software for hundreds of millions, he’d say the bank still didn’t take it seriously. They would never regard him as being a serious businessman. And yet obviously he was doing incredibly well. And so you began to understand why there seemed to be this strange misunderstanding of what the British video games industry was, what it represented, and the type of people it employed.

GC: What also interests me is that we still have very good developers in this country, but it’s not at all obvious from their output. GTA is the classic example, where from just playing the game you’d never dream the creators were based in Scotland.

AC: You have got a situation now where back in the ‘80s, very much in the UK, it was an individual or a small team that wrote a game. So because the magazines, in a pre-Internet age, had to write about something they got enthusiastic about the people behind the games as well. And hence pushed them up into this almost rock star like status.

But when you’re dealing with something like Grand Theft Auto you’re dealing with teams that are much larger, and although you do get people like Peter Molyneux, even there he’s just one person working on a game from a team of about a hundred. So the individuals don’t tend to stand out anymore, as such. So that’s another reason for it.

GC: That’s true up to a point, but it’s very easy to tell when a game is made America, it’s even easier to tell when it’s made in Japan. And there are even games, Rayman for example, that are identifiably French. But nothing that looks or sounds like it was made in this country.

AC: I can give you a very, very straight answer as to why that is. 50 people have told me the same thing, it’s effectively because we don’t have a major UK publisher. Ubisoft is a French publisher, the Japanese publishers have the opportunity of publishing Japanese games, and American publishers can push whatever they like. We don’t have a major UK publisher anymore. The last one was Eidos, who went in 2009 when they were bought by Square Enix.

And if you have a major UK force they can allow that British creativity to come through, whereas when you don’t have a major UK publisher the developers from the UK have to look around for jobs elsewhere. All the studios here in the UK now, their paymasters are from overseas. I’m not suggesting for one moment that that’s bad…

GC: I’m saying it’s bad. [laughs]

AC: Well, personally I think it’s a crying shame. But what we’re trying to understand is how we got ourselves into that position. There’s a very interesting statistic actually, in the early ‘90s there was a 22 month period where we saw an almost 78 per cent drop off in financial activity of UK companies working on video games between ’93 and ’95. Which is almost a straight line on a graph. And that means money being generated in the UK by UK businesses and the money staying in the UK. By ’95 most developers were owned by Sony, Ubisoft, and various other companies. So the money was obviously going outside of the UK.

So that gives you an example of how we completely, as publishers, we lost our way. We didn’t necessarily loose a whole lot of developers, but they were effectively bought by overseas. So that’s the point of the film where we’re finding it the most interesting and volatile. Because you’re also seeing a lot of very, very talented, genius like developers that effectively, by ’95, walked away. They left the industry entirely and went and worked at insurance companies doing business software.

GC: Oh, it’s terrible. Did you talk to Andrew Braybrook at all? His is one of the most depressing stories, he’s working at some database company or something now. Quite lucrative I think, but it’s like having Miyamoto work at a bank or something.

AC: Exactly. I’ve already done the telephone interview with him and we’re now going to do the filmed interview as well. And he’s not the only one, when you’re dealing with people like Dino Dini… we interviewed Matthew Smith recently, there’s a clip on the website I don’t know if you saw?

GC: I didn’t actually, no. Where is he now then?

AC: He’s in Liverpool living with his mum.

GC: Good God.

AC: He’s not well, effectively he went completely off the rails in 1986 and he only just made it back. He only did two games but Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are so thoroughly British…

GC: Well, that’s the depressing thing. 30 years later and they’re still the best example of a British made video game that actually feels British.

AC: They’re one of the things we’re running the campaign off, we’ve got ZX Spectrums signed by him, and Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, because we just knew they’d be so popular.

But just to finish explaining how we ended up where we are, we had some near misses with the BBC and Channel 4. We almost crossed with Charlie Brooker, because we thought Gameswipe was very, very good and we went into the BBC with a real hard push with what was by that point called From Bedrooms to Billions. And they’d just commissioned Micro Men, that BBC 4 drama. And they said to us, ‘We’ll commission your documentary and the first episode will go out straight after Micro Men’.

And we were actually about a month into production and the head of BBC 4 canned it and, this is again that famous quote, that led me to say to Nicola, ‘We’re not taking this to broadcast anymore’. But they said: ‘The controller has come across the project and unfortunately feels that video gaming is too niche a subject for BBC 4’.

Both: [laughs]

AC: Now you consider some of the things on BBC 4. They’ve had documentaries on flag weaving.

GC: On what?

AC: They had a three-part series on the evolution of the flag. And episode two was on weaving techniques.

GC: Well, I don’t think the subject of flag weaving can be dealt with in anything less than an hour long documentary.

AC: [laughs] This is the frustrating thing for us, because the video games industry in the UK was a fantastic achievement. It created huge numbers of jobs, it effectively created an industry from scratch. It came from enthusiast interest, it wasn’t… you take the U.S. and Atari. Nolan Bushnell and Allan Alcorn knew it was a commercial enterprise right from the start in 1972. ‘We will make these machines to sell for money’. That was it.

In the UK in 1980/81 the majority, because we have come across a few who said, ‘No, I was in it for the money’, but most of the people said: ‘I got a computer in my bedroom and I loved going to the arcades and I wanted to try and emulate what was on the arcades on my computer’. That was it. And to them it was what you would do in your spare time. An obsession with programming and making games.

GC: So do you feel this story will have a happy ending? Because I imagine the recent explosion in the indie and smartphone market is going to be something you’ll cover. Although I’d still consider that a bitter sweet ending, because I still want to see big budget identifiably British games again – not just 69p touchscreen games.

AC: Well, the happy ending, we hope, is that there is now a full circle with smartphones. That it is now possible, just like in the early ‘80s, to write a game in six weeks and self-publish. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s definitely going to be successful, but at least it’s put a little bit of power back into the one-man band or small team developer. So the publishers have lost some power on that.

What we hope to achieve with our film is we’ve gone to crowd-funding because we effectively couldn’t get it through TV commissioning, so we decided that because of King of Kong and a couple of other U.S. movies, we thought ‘Let’s make this a British independent feature film. We always say it’s a feature film, it’s not a Web film or a little short documentary. It’s a two hour feature film, which we’ve been shooting on film. We’ve been doing it for nearly 18 months, in between other paid projects, and this has been pretty much a labour of love.

And we’ve gone and we’ve now shot over 50 interviews and we’re gonna shoot more. And we hope we’ll have the film finished by September. The Kickstarter campaign is a way people can pre-buy and look at what we’re trying to achieve, and the final end result of the film is that we’ve already pledged, and we’re already working with Ukie to make it happen, the film will be available free of charge to every school in the UK from 2014. To act, hopefully, as some form of inspirational tool.

Because we’ve lost so much, we’re not getting a new generation of developers, it’s dropping off at an alarming rate. And things like the Raspberry Pi and other things like the NESTA report from Ian Livingstone has been a drive to get kids interested in getting under the hood of what makes apps and programs.

So we thought if we had a film that schools could show to that 13 to 14-year-old age group, and it’s a really great movie that shows this amazing era in UK history, then it might just be one of those extra little things to help get kids back into developing and making games again. We don’t know, but that’s the whole purpose of what we’re trying to achieve.

GC: That’s great, I wish you the very best of luck.

AC: Thank you, oh and we just announced that we’ve got a new soundtrack that we’re working on with Rob Hubbard and Ben Daglish.

GC: Really?!

AC: Two UK legends who are both… well, certainly Rob Hubbard is retired from the games industry and took quite a bit of persuading but now he’s absolutely loving it. He’s really enjoying the idea of working on film.

GC: So he’s creating original music for your film? Are they chiptunes?

AC: No, original music… he’s a very, very talented musician. If you go to the Kickstarter page, we tweeted it about an hour ago, he did a special version on a sine wave of his Commando high score theme. If you remember that you’ll recognise the tune immediately. But that’s the only reworked music in the film, everything else is original and brand new. So it’s a combination of electronic and also classic instruments. He’s been working with an Arabian artist and others to create some really strange, organic sounds.

It’s going to be really amazing, I went to a session on Sunday, because we’re also filming a Making Of for the music, because we were dying to announce it. And it just sort of fell together. Because he was going to do one, then two, then Ben Daglish got involved, and now we may well have [name redacted] as well.

GC: Well that all sounds fantastic, I really can’t wait to see it all. And hear it.